- A Dex / SPD arms race tends to develop between the players. This happens both because of their relative effectiveness and also because in groups of more than 3 players, higher SPD means you actually get to do things aside from waiting for your turn in Champions lengthy combat. This also becomes self reinforcing, as characters who pump up DEX and SPD are not pumping up defenses and are therefore less likely to be able to withstand a hit, so they need to put more points into going first and being able to dodge. This not only causes issues with the GM keeping enemies within a beatable but challenging CV range, but also results in the campaign gradually shifting away from a "superhero" feel and towards a "gunslinger" feel, and puts a strain on the genre simulation.
- Characters built around mulitpowers get to pick up a spiffy new power every couple sessions, while most other character types have to content themselves with mild stat increases or maybe a new martial maneuver. 6 points for a new 60 active point fixed slot is really cheap compared to the 30 points to put a new 60 active point power into an elemental control. While the usage limits may balance those point costs against each other in the abstract, the assumptions of 1-3 XP per session means that it's pretty much a whole semester before the elemental control character picks up one new power (unless he gets stupidly creative with limitations). One PC getting 5 new powers at effective levels in the time another PC gets only 1 new power at an effective level tends to breed some resentment.
- Balance issues as regards the interaction between advancement and active point caps / CV limits / Damage Class maximums / "Rule of X". Either PCs get to use advancement to push past the original campaign limits (which can throw off the threat enemies are supposed to pose) or the caps last for the entire campaign (which means that everybody eventually buys up to the caps and nobody gets to specialize in a mechanically distinct way.
- At the start of the session, each player in attendance gets a token.
- They also receive tokens banked from the prior session (more on that below)
- These tokens are then used to bid on various characteristics, skills, powers, and perks which are selected one-at-a-time randomly from cards in a deck pregenerated by the GM.
- The total point value of the cards drawn in each week is made equivalent to the total point value of the XP that would have been awarded to the group in the usual XP method. But this could be just a couple of high-point cards or a whole slew of low-point cards.
- When all of the cards have been bid on, players pass their tokens in for the GM to record as banked for the following week.
- Then the GM hands one new token out to each player - this may be given away to any other player before the end of the session. My original rule was "for any reason", but I much prefer Bleys's refinement: "You give that to someone when they do something awesome"
- It is strongly recommended that tokens be something hefty enough to be thrown from the far ends of the table, but light enough not to cause damage. Some especially memorable actions/quips have resulted in players being literally showered with tokens.
- Whenever a player leaves the session, they let the GM know of any additional tokens received in this way so the GM can record them as banked for the next session's bidding.
It also went a long way towards solving my second as players who spent all of their tokens winning bids for new character abilities would have far fewer to bid in the following week, while players who hadn't gotten powers in a while would have the most tokens left to bid on new ones.
And by allowing all group members to use their bids to "vote with their tokens" for who most needed which cards, this combined with the ruling that point caps only apply at chargen to indirectly reduce the problems of the third (although it could very well have backfired on that one - there's nothing inherent in this system to enforce such co-operation)
But the really big deal here is that it's a mechanism for the group as a whole to provide instantaneous positive reinforcement for appropriate behaviour. This really encourages people to engage in the types of behaviors the group likes (with this group, that's mainly genre simulation, deep in character RPing and witty in-character quips).
Furthermore, it helped in that it provided a ritualized way to start the game session and get people focused at the start of the session. This may not seem like much, but for a large group with staggered arrival times, it's been very helpful.
Additionally, it provided an easy way to handle bookkeeping for players who had to leave a session early (we have some folks with wildly varied work schedules). No arguing about "but Brian left after the henchmen, he missed the real fight with Dr. Badguy so he should get less XP" If you have to leave early, you can still "do something awesome" in that reduced timeframe.
Furthermore, the horizontal advancement resulted in characters branching into areas they had not originally intended in a way that has seemed to mimic the not-so-straightforward power gain exhibited in comic books. Example: some random draws and a player "bargain shopping" for advancement resulted in the character acquiring Speed Reading multiple times. The player used this as a springboard to transition from a character all about energy blasting to a character about information processing abilities (which happened to include energy blasting)
Now the downside is that players do get a lot less control over how their characters advance, and they can feel forced to advance horizontally when they want to advance vertically - and that causes some resentment and frustration. After many discussions amongst the group, point 4 was amended a couple of times. It has ended up with a hybrid system, where the point value of cards works out to about 3 per player per session, but players still get 1 discretionary point per session. This is roughly twice the standard advancement rate, but players only have about half as much control, so it seems to work out.
Of course the real beauty of this system is that it can be easily adapted to any roleplaying game which does not use level / treasure based advancement.
While the cards for HERO are stuff like "gain one new background skill", +2" with any movement mode already possessed" or "reduce the severity of one drawback by 5 points" one could just as easily put a deck together for say aWoD which used cards like "Increase the rating of a resource already possessed by one rank", "Gain one new ability in a discipline already possessed" or "increase any social attribute by one dot" or "increase your Edge by one"
